Ross Rocklynne - People of the Darkness

He fondled the thought with languid, luscious introspection, hardly aware that every passing moment brought him nearer extinction. He passed in thought over the mad, mad years of his life, as he blundered through the heavenly corridors, seeking and not finding, stretched on the agonizing rack of his own thoughts, tortured with dreams. Now it seemed as if all memory of his pain were softened.

“Yellow Light,” he thought sadly. “I should have been proud of my name.”

He could no longer focus thoughts. He knew he was dying. And yet, dying before the wise old creature, a lost remembrance plagued him.

He fought with himself. “I must know,” he thought in stark horror, knowing that he could no longer form the words. “I must. Oldster! Let me die then — but first let me know! For what did I search?”

Soothingly, faintly, gently came the answering whisper. “For the seventeenth band. But it was beyond recall — the seventeenth band, backward in time the length of your life when you were but a child; when you knew nothing of life, even your own; when the universe seemed to sing a great song of peace. You remember, Yellow Light! Now you know that your search was in vain, save in death!”

Oldster’s voice was gone, and Yellow Light sank into an abyss from which even he knew there would be no return. “Save in death,” he repeated, as the darkness yawned; it was truth.

He thought he heard the pounding, soundless rhythm of a swelling song as the universe singled him out and made him the center of being, the hub of the great wheel, the master, the supreme audience. It was good. He imagined himself to be very young again.

The story of Darkness has been told. Darkness, the dreamer who crossed the immeasurable gulf of lightless emptiness between two universes. He, an energy creature tens of millions of miles in girth, sought the answer to life. Perhaps he found that answer in death, when he mated in the thus-far inaccessible band of life.

Also, the story of Darkness’ daughter Sun Destroyer has been told. She plunged back along Darkness’s trail to seek out that aged, sorrowing being whose name was Oldster. For Oldster was wise. He had counseled Darkness. Surely Oldster could lead Sun Destroyer to her life’s completion in the forty-ninth band of hyperspace. But there was no forty-ninth band, unless it lay in Sun Destroyer’s wild fantasies of impossible happiness. She too died, yearning for her son Vanguard, the infant purple-light who lay helpless in the seventeenth band of hyperspace.

The story of Vanguard has been told. He was renamed Yellow Light by his taunting playmates, because of imperfections in his central core. Disabled by his long stay in the seventeenth band, he was never to know contentment. Oldster, in his compassion and wisdom, led Vanguard to mate — to create and thus to die — for he knew Vanguard’s true greatness, that he was destined to father a new race which would supplant the old.

There is, however, another story to be told, the last story of the darkness, the story of the purple-light named Devil Star. Out of the infinities he comes, pressing headlong through the scattered concourses of the stars. Cursed beyond hope, Devil Star, even from the moment of his birth, seeks a nameless thing, a secret held inviolate in the depths of his thought swirls. Moving at speeds far beyond that of light itself, he does not know he flees a horror he cannot outdistance.

Millions of years have passed since this Devil Star’s crashing birth. Stars have swung in their elongated orbits. The universe in that instant of time has blurred into a slightly different pattern. Novae have flickered in their feebly dying explosions, puffing out upon space the excreta of their deaths. Planets have been born, lush with life, and that life has died. Decay and crushing retrogression is the story being enacted on this entropic stage, and yet he who flees in his torment does not see the ultimate hope this holds out for him.

Around him, above, and below to a depth beyond imagination stretch untold millions of light-years, and this Devil Star has traversed them all. He has peered with searing tentacles of energy into the bursting hearts of atoms. With touch that is gentle and loving he has reached for the darting wave-trains of electrons, striving to control his horror so that he might comprehend that shattering law which came into being at a time unthinkably remote. Not succeeding, he has turned into a wild creature, loosing his grief and longing into attack on this teeming universe and the forty-eight bands of hyperspace which compose it.

The forty-eighth band.

Comes the drugging memory that darts within its cage, seeking a door never made for its escape. And Devil Star thunders through space pursued by the horror of his memory.

Now there are dreams, dying sometimes to mere awareness. There is around him the tympanic thrumming of hyperspace’s thirteenth band, and he seeks to attune himself to that harmonic, to become a sympathetic instrument on which it might play. He dreams awhile, dreams the great staggering dream that he is controlling this moment, this naked, two-dimensioned instant of time-dreams that in this thin-sliced layer of eternity he is master.

“For one stripped moment,” dreams Devil Star, “let me control. Then I shall have the answer!” To what?

The raging of thought, the denial of universal communion, the sinking again into that battle with the unimaginable webwork of motion that began ten thousand billion years ago.

But there is the grief of longing, and the desire; and then memory, speeding wraithlike from the far distances of time, striking him, rebounding, returning to strike again. There are the green-lights, the half-hundred of them scattered through the millions of his years of his life. And there is that other green-light, the mother green-light, she who created him and nurtured him and taught him. He does not want to think of her.

There was a time when Devil Star was young. He does not want to think of it. Yet he was young, once. Must he think of it? Yes, he must, in dread nostalgic pain which in being felt again somehow lost a part of its edge.

Therefore he must think again of his youth, of the years of play — of youth and that great yard of galaxies surrounded by the high fence of the darkness. Youth and the joys of living. Youth — and the deep-fluttering memory of his birth.

Into his ten-millionth year, this Devil Star never spoke of that memory. He kept it cold and dying in an unplumbed chamber of his thought swirls. Then the memory, having grown too large, must press upward in its wild escape. And these are the memories of Devil Star:

“Moon Flame!”

The memory of Moon Flame is so strong.

“You spoke?” Devil Star’s companion in the joyous race across that galaxy touched him briefly with his visions.

“Yes, I spoke. Moon Flame, listen to me. I must know something. Whether you — if the others — if they remember.”

The purple-light Moon Flame rotated lazily in his hurtling flight. “Remember what?”

“The moment of birth,” said Devil Star. “Remember the mother, the dying father, the band of life.” He felt his sickness come upon him as he uttered the words. He strove to control the fluttering of his aura, without success, for there was concerned alarm in the gaze of Moon Flame.

“I remember nothing of this,” said Moon Flame slowly. “Birth, death, father. The words are meaningless; you speak in riddles. And while we talk we lose the race. I see the others in the galaxy beyond. Shall we forget these riddles and move on faster?”